Image by me and the sysop

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you might notice that some of the most successful folks on Twitter make a concerted effort to help out their friends / followers. And they seem to ask for nothing in return!

Many folks believe, including me, that this practice of selfless giving is central to all success, personal and professional.

The problem is that no matter how helpful you want to be, no one’s invented a way to get 25 hours out of a day.

Until Now

Using a combination of Twitter tools, you can practice enlightened self-interest without the need for prescription drugs.

Following are examples of how to save time with Twitter tools to find out 1) what your friends need, 2) collecting that information, and 3) giving them that information.

Note: Don’t try this with ALL of your friends, just a few – or you really will go mental!

What Does My Friend Need?

Most of us have a general idea of what our friends need, but may have missed the few tweets about problems with a client project or thesis.

TweetStats can be used to find out details about your friend (in a non-spying way, of course . After you’ve entered your friend’s twitter ID, Study the TweetCloud:

Mousing over the tweetcloud shows 49 mentions of “coffee” in Darren Rowse’s twitterings. Is this useful information? You decide.

How Can I Find It?

Once you know what your friend needs, use a combination of the following automated search methods:

• Test Keywords With Monitter.com – This snazzy tool let’s you compare the frequency of three different keywords. In Melbourne, Australia, “coffee” occurs more often than “cappuccino” or “tea”:

You can then subscribe to updates on your search using the RSS feed.

• TweetBeep works much like Google alerts, but you can combine keyword searches with location criteria. It also allows you to be alerted whenever a particular web-site it tweeted, even if the URL is shortened!

• Don’t Forget Google! Google alerts will pick up anything outside of Twitter. Set the alert to “as it happens” so that you can quickly send any valuable content to your friend.

How Can I Get It To Them?

Beyond TweetDeck, iTweet, Twhirl and Twitter.com, here are two pain-free ways to get information to your friends:

TwitThat: This is a firefox add-on that lets you quickly post the URL of a website you’re reading. The cool thing is that you can create a “reply list” of your friends in a drop down menu:

Clicking “twit” automatically posts the webpage in twitter as “@Problogger – found this:” Saves much more time than copying and pasting URLs and headlines. Also, having your friends listed in this drop-down keeps them foremost in your mind.

TwitterFeed is a utility that automatically posts updates of any RSS feed. Like TwitThat, you can also create a “reply to” prefix of tweets. In our example, we could post updates from the Starbucks blog and post them with “@Problogger – Coffee News:” at the beginning of the tweet.

This is perfect for those situations where someone is working on an urgent project and would love to receive helpful information from you, even while you’re sleeping!

If used thoughtfully (in a non-stalking way ), these techniques can help you be useful on Twitter without going mentally insane.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How To Be Useful On Twitter Without Going Crazy

Monitter is a tracking tool for Twitter that enables you to enter multiple keywords that you want to monitor and then to watch any tweets that mention these words in real time.

Here’s how it looks with four words that I just plugged in (click to enlarge):

Potential Uses for Monitter

While there are other tools around that track keywords there is a lot to like about Monitter and I could see it being useful for many applications such as:

Vanity watching – you can see that two of the words that I’ve entered are ‘problogger’ and ‘twitip’ – words that are associated with my brand. Watching words like these are important if you’re interested in monitoring what people are saying about you and your business, brand, products etc.

Networking – interested in networking with people talking about a topic that you’re interested in? Enter a keyword associated with that topic and watch who is using the word. It might take you a while to find the right word (for example my ‘twitter’ column is updating so fast I can’t keep up.

Business Opportunities – I write a blog about digital cameras and how to use them. When I enter the word ‘digital camera’ I’m immediately tapping into the conversations of thousands of people talking about their cameras. Already in watching those keywords I can see people talking about how their cameras don’t work, asking how to use certain featured etc. A smart business would be using tools like this to interact with those people.

Enlarging Your Twitter Community – I just did a quick experiment and added the words “first tweet’ to a column. Within seconds I saw 10 people leaving their first ever Twitter entries. All it took was me to reply to them with a ‘welcome to Twitter’ and to follow them and I had three new friends.

I’m certain that there are many other ways of using a keyword monitoring tool like Monitter – I’d like to hear how you use them (and what other tools you use).

Monitter Features

• Monitter by Location – in the top left corner you can add a location and specify a distance from that location that you want to monitor tweets from.
• Language – in the bottom left corner you can switch to a number of languages
• Add Keywords – in the bottom right corner you can add or subtract columns to monitor.
• RSS – want to monitor keywords via RSS instead of on the Monitter website – no problem – once you’ve added a keyword you’re given an RSS feed for that word.
• Widgets for Your Website – want to show your blog or website reader what people are tweeting about a keyword? There’s a widget tool that enables you to add real time monitoring of keywords to your site.
• Advanced Search - you can search for @problogger to find references to a twitter user, “enclose your search in quotes” for exact phrases, search for one term OR another, search for terms mentioned with links and more (see the ‘help’ link in the right hand navigation area.

One thing that I’d like to see added to Monitter would be the ability to reply somehow from within the page. At the moment when you hit reply you’re taken to Twitter to reply.

Overall I think this could be a useful tool. I won’t use it all the time but I think it’d be particularly useful during a conference or when lauching a project.

Interested to hear what others think of Monitter and how you’d use it.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Monitter – Real Time Keyword Monitoring of Twitter